Amidst the milling crowd popping canapes around Loro Piana’s static and featureless mannequins, this presentation contained a jewel. Two gloved custodians stood by a table on which rested this fabric-founded house’s first-ever sample book, from the spring/summer 1926 season. A double breasted suit in the atrium of Loro Piana’s presentation space (just next to the Corriere Della Sera office) had been crafted from a new remix of the house’s very first run, a subtly-striped charcoal wool.
Alongside that book was this season’s equivalent, the star swatch of which looked like the kaleidoscopically color-accented dotty Donegal whose wool base had been delicately seasoned with polyamide to give it the lightness and durability today’s LP customers rightly expect. As ever, the house’s design teams leant into multiple categories of classicism to shape a collection dedicated to showcasing the quality of its ingredients. Silk cashmere brocades, buttons, and hat pins were all patterned with the thistle flower that both represents the house and which is central to its processing of some of the world’s finest cashmeres.
In menswear a wonderful stash pocket work jacket in cashmere-denim was placed upon its mannequin over a cashmere roll-neck and black cashmere pants. I loved that Donegal in a shirt under a quilt-lined dark wool “fur” jacket; my Runway colleague loved the same fabric used in its womenswear cousin. There was no shortage of soft shouldered cashmere, wool, or vicuna blazers and jackets worn under knitwear both fine and chunky, but always soft. Tucked away in an ante-room was a collection of handsome ski and snow wear to which had been applied Loro Piana’s many weather-repelling systems.
In womenswear pill box hats topped stately, eminently polite mid-century skirt and jacket ensembles. There were some beautiful tuxedo-based evening looks with delicately applied thistle embroidery details. Italy holds the presidency of the G7 this year, and you could easily see heads of state from every nation keen to showcase this Loro Piana offer as a nod to the summit of global fabric craft and manufacture.
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